33cl bottle from Carrefour Market Cours St. Michel in Brussels.
F: medium, pink, good retention.
C: black red, opaque.
A: strawberry and cherries in sugary way.
T: cherries, some strawberries, blueberries, bit lemon, medium carbonation, if you are into lemonade this could be drinkable.

Kasteel Blond flavoured with fruit extracts (pineapple, passionfruit, peach and mango), one of the newest additions to the Kasteel range, but why? Maybe they want to elaborate on the commercial success of their Rouge, one of the most popular embodiments of that infernal 'style' since it was first launched in 2007, and decided that a red version should be joined by an 'innovative' yellow version? I see a parallel with those Tarot beers by Lindemans, Yell'Oh by Liefmans and a few others - so apparently this phenomenon of artificially flavoured, very sweet 'fruit' beers with a yellow hue rather than a red one is already spreading. This must be stopped before it spreads as widely as that dreadful rouge hype has done. As for this one: rather thin, quickly breaking, snow white, tiny-bubbled 'ring' for a head on a crystal clear, obviously filtered, pure yellow-golden blonde robe, looking like a standard macro lager in fact - which may be one of the motivations behind this evil new trend. Repulsive lemonade-like nose lacking anything beery, with impressions of granulated white sugar and Sprite the way I remember it from childhood, completely artificial extracts of yellow fruits with - admittedly - the 'core' features of all four abovementioned fruits being recognisable and none dominating another but also containing ripe pear as an unlisted fifth 'fruit', white soap, freshly ironed kitchen towels, breakfast cereals, hints of rubber band and children's medicine. Evidently white sugar-sweet onset, very Sprite-like, with very fizzy carb just like lemonade; after this onslaught of 'white' and sterile sugariness, the artificial fruit aroma parade starts, but it presents little else than fleeting 'perfumey' impressions of - in descending order of prevalence - peach, mango, passionfruit and pineapple with no complexity at all; it is as if these four fruits, all of which have been used in beer before in a more natural way, are reduced to waferthin caricatures of themselves, worse even than in the most industrial and cheapest fruit jam imaginable. This sugared fruit juice parade moves over a thin thread of basic pale cerealliness but do not expect to taste anything even remotely 'beery'; the finish adds only an odd rubbery element as well as something, frankly, a bit 'stinky', like a contaminated ditch almost devoid of life. Hops remain completely unseen and unnoticed, while that white sugariness sticks to the teeth a bit. I was not expecting anything natural and I (vaguely) remember how 'basic' the flavour of Kasteel Blond is, but I was not expecting even its most basic beer features to be totally drowned in this awful combo of industrial sugar and industrial fruit 'perfumes'. I cannot think of a fate gruesome enough to punish the guy at Van Honsebrouck who came up with this infernal idea - but the sobering truth is that probably this creation from beer hell has the potential to break through as a huge commercial success among youngsters who still have a lot to learn, in the same way rouge got so big that you can buy it from almost any supermarket today. This is the world we live in today, and I guess I have grown too old now to passively undergo it... But I digress: I hope these yellow sugar-'fruited' brews do not make it into a new big trend (I claim the term 'jaunes' here and now) but chances are that they will, and if they do, I would even recommend Kasteel Rouge over this one, just do not ask me why.